How do students at the end of secondary school consider the challenges of sustainable development of the Seine in France? What avenues for education?

Abstract

This article aims to understand how students aged 14–17 from different contexts in France consider the issues related to the Seine. 20 interviews were carried out focusing on the implementation of an educational approach enabling students to grasp the priority issues associated with the sustainable development of the Seine. The analysis brings out the way in which the students have experienced the educational approach; it aims to characterise their relationship with the river, and to define their eco-citizen engagement. Several specificities emerge depending on the context studied, but the students of the three schools underline the interest of approaches that go beyond the traditional education form and that are rooted in their local reality. Our article set the interest in valorising another way of learning where students feel more free and autonomous and also requires training teachers in the development of their agency for a transformative-sociocritical approach of ESE.

Keywords:

• Environmental and sustainability education
• France
• secondary level

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Our study is part of a larger research project supported by the ANR and the FRQSC and carried out in France and Quebec on intercultural education for the environment and sustainable development. A similar analysis of the data has been published in French (Barroca-Paccard, Kalali, and Jeziorski 2020), but this study opens up more specifically to discuss the results with a view to formulating avenues for teacher training in transformative-sociocritical Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) that takes account of the students’ concerns.

2 SVT includes the scientific subjects of biology and geology and is a school discipline within the French education system.

3 These lessons are practical because it’s a project in a small group, and interdisciplinary because they are taught by teachers of several disciplines, who work in teams on the same theme. These lessons may concern all subjects, for example in the case of SD subjects, "Ecological transition and sustainable development" combines History-Geography and Life Sciences around the theme of "immediate risks" and History-Geography, Mathematics and Technology around the theme of "natural resources such as oil".

4 In this first stage of the research, a questionnaire was administered to 640 students of the same age in five French and Quebec schools participating in the project (Kalali, Therriault, and Bader, 2019).

5 In connection with the epistemic dimension, the analysis of the interviews also made it possible to identify the pupils’ relationship to ecological knowledge and their representations of nature and biodiversity. Pupils in the three schools expressed major concerns about pollution and developed two main visions of nature based either on specific diversity, which they often associated with the term biodiversity, or on habitats and ecosystems. The detailed results are presented in another publication (Barroca-Paccard, Kalali and Jeziorski, 2020) and will be partly used in the discussion of this article.

6 Mayor of Paris.

7 The yellow vests protests (in french: mouvement des gilets jaunes) are a series of weekly protests for economic justice and later political reforms that began in France on 17 November 2018.